Tuesday, March 06, 2007

ZFS for Linux Beta 1

Even though this is a beta release, it should be more stable than your typical beta filesystem. The main problems in this release are (lack of) performance and high memory usage with some load patterns.

The plan is to implement all the missing features marked for 0.4.0 in the STATUS file and then release beta2. After that I intend to focus on performance, release rc1 and after extensive testing release 0.4.0 final.

I wish to thank all the users who have been testing and helping this project.I also want to give a special thanks to Phil Worrall, Chris Samuel, David Plumpton and especially Roland (devzero) for all the patches, bug reports, tests and suggestions :)

I have installed 0.4 beta1 and written a small script to periodically take snapshots of my documents and code filesystem. Your work is so great that brings an easy-to-use snapshot system in Linux. That's really great!

It is really nice to see ZFS coming to Linux finally! I just wondered, how much work would it be to port ZFS/Fuse to be a native in kernel filesystem? I'm asking this because I feel a reluctance around me to use a fuse based fs 'In production'. I've also heard that distros will not consider fuse-based fses as their root fs. From what I can say is that the biggest problem for zfs on linux is that it's fuse based. So how much work would it be, and is this allready planned?

Well, but why not an out-of-tree module for zfs? Modules for filesystems can be put in initrd for boot, and i think that the license would not be a problem (consider the number of distros that are shipping with ATI/NVidia binary blobs). Sun could also be quite happy, as they would get more credit for it, compared to having the filesystem merged in the kernel tree.